Aches and Pains

13Apr

A year out from breast reconstruction I am still having the odd occasional ache or pain. Most of the time it’s in my chest but sometimes my remaining latissimus muscles will cramp up for no apparent reason.

For instance, last Thursday evening we were at DisneyWorld. We have annual passes so we’re somewhere on property pretty frequently. After walking around the property of a house we’re very interested in buying we headed over to the park. By the time we got there my chest was aching.

On the 1 to 10 pain scale it was only about a 3 but something like that hadn’t happened in quite a while. It had been at least two months. My upper chest was tender to the touch and the muscles around my cleavage ached to the point that I wished I had some Tylenol. It was bizarre.

The pains I spoke of earlier are nerve pains. It feels like someone is poking me with a long, thin pin. Unfortunately this has been an ongoing situation. They tend to crop up suddenly in either my chest or my back. At the beginning it was all my chest. More recently it has been more in my back.

Before my father-in-law passed at the beginning of last month I had been training using the Couch to 2K program. A few weeks into the program I got a pinched nerve in, of all places, my right breast. Which is weird considering the skin on most of the breast is numb but the tissue underneath has sensation.

Right now as I type this, I have minor nerve pains in my left breast and the right side of my back aches. I walk such a fine line with activity. If I do too much, I ache, if I don’t do enough, I ache.

Of course the discomfort is minor in comparison to the first time I got out of bed right after surgery. That hurt worse than labor even WITH the morphine. I just would have thought that by now I’d be past nerve pain and back aches.